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The Indian government revoked the special status accorded to Indian-administered Kashmir in its constitution, the most far-reaching political move on the disputed region in nearly 70 years.

A presidential decree issued on August 5 revoked Article 370 of India’s constitution that guaranteed special rights to the Muslim-majority state, including the right to its own constitution and autonomy to make laws on all matters except defence, communications and foreign affairs.

In the lead-up to the move, India sent thousands of additional troops to the disputed region, imposed a crippling curfew, shut down telecommunications and internet, and arrested political leaders.

By restricting journalists’ access to the outside world and harassing them on the streets, the Indian government is effectively stifling reports of unrest in Kashmir following its decision to revoke the region’s autonomy, reporters, editors and rights groups say.

This week, the Supreme Court in Delhi ordered the government to respond to a petition by the editor of the Kashmir Timesnewspaper, demanding an end to the communications blockade that has been in place since 4 August.

Without access to the internet, mobile networks or landline phones, hundreds of reporters in the Valley have been forced to share a government-run “media facilitation centre” with just five desktop computers, two of which are reserved for women.

Others, assuming use of the computers is being monitored, said they had stocked up on USB sticks and external hard drives to store mostly photo and video footage of protests and send out their data via friends travelling to different parts of India.

But if getting the story out is hard enough, it is while physically attending the protests that journalists find themselves in the most trouble.

In the days leading up to 23 August, pamphlets were circulated by protest leaders setting out a date, time and location where Kashmiris upset by the loss of their autonomy where asked to gather, in Anchar Soura, an area in Srinagar.

Some journalists managed to attend, but a number of them told The Independent they were stopped at a checkpoint after leaving, stripped of their identity documents and briefly detained.

Xuhaib Maqbool, a photojournalist who has worked in Kashmir for the last seven years, is living proof that journalists face the threat of physical force from the police – and that this danger is not necessarily a new one.

Xuhaib is blind in the left eye from an incident on 4 September 2016, when a policeman opened fire on him with a shotgun full of pellets – a “non-lethal” crowd control tool that has led to tens of thousands of injuries in the decades of separatist unrest in the region.

He believes the situation for journalists in Kashmir is more dangerous and life-threatening now than at any point in recent years.

Xuhaib says he was stopped by the Indian paramilitary forces on 17 August, during a protest which broke out after the death of a civilian, Ayoub Khan, amid clashes where the forces had fired tear gas.

He says the security forces refused to let Xuhaib and other accredited journalists take photographs documenting the protest, or even to stay and report it. “After many requests and pleading for half an hour, the policeman eventually told us to go, saying ‘Chal nikal, agar idhar photo kheencha to haddiyan tod dunga’ (go, if you click any photographs here I’ll break your bones),” recalls Xuhaib.

Police threats of violence towards journalists are a common theme in many accounts of what life is like reporting from behind the communications blockade.

In an incident the day after the government’s 5 August announcement, a reporter for The Independent and a photographer were attempting to document the new restrictions when they came across an army checkpoint with an armoured vehicle – and an old TV, being used to control traffic.

As they attempted to photograph the unusual scene, a group of policemen hauled the reporter out of his car, pulled his beard and forced him to unlock his phone and delete the photos.

Fearing for his life, this reporter did so, but was later able to recover the images from a “recently deleted” file. As the police returned the journalists’ identity cards, one officer threatened: “I have all your details. If you use any [of these] pictures, I will kill you.”

Shahana Butt, a senior TV journalist working in the region for Press TV, told The Independent she had never before worked in such difficult conditions.

“For the first 10 days, I had no idea where to go,” she said. “I have not seen such a situation in my 11 years as a journalist. The communication blackout has given open space for rumour-mongering. Detours and checkpoints hamper journalists from reaching events which need timely attention,” she said.

Kashmir Times editor Anuradha Bhasin, who filed the Supreme Court petition, said the restrictions on local journalists meant the media coverage of the crisis was skewed overwhelmingly in favour of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.

“The government has its own publicity department, but over and above that, you have these big moneyed television channels, you have certain sections of print media who are virtually working as extensions of the government publicity department,” she told The Associated Press on Thursday. “They are giving a one-sided picture.”

Amnesty International has said the communications ban denies the Kashmiri people’s right to freedom of expression, and on Wednesday the regional director for Human Rights Watch, Meenakshi Ganguly, said the restrictions “should be lifted immediately”.

India applies its internet shutdowns using a British colonial-era law from 1885 stating that it is “in the interest of public safety and for maintaining public order”.

It uses such measures more regularly than any other country in the world, according to the US nonprofit Freedom House. And of the 340 internet shutdowns since Mr Modi came to power in 2014, more than half have been based in Kashmir, including 55 this year.

The shutdowns have a compounding effect, said Sundar Krishnan, executive director of the Delhi-based Software Freedom Legal Centre – disrupting businesses and schools and demoralising the public.

“It’s obstructing the free flow of information, but it’s also bringing many elements of a modern society to a grinding halt,” he said.

PAMPORE, India — Dusk was falling as the three boys walked home from the neighborhood mosque.

Farhan Farooq, a skinny 13-year-old with a tuft of black hair, was the youngest. Suddenly, a police vehicle came to a stop next to them and armed officers jumped out in the August twilight. They bundled the three friends into the car, one of the other boys recalled later. Farhan began to cry.

For the next week, Farhan’s family said, he was held in a jail cell at the local police station in this Kashmiri town 10 miles outside of Srinagar, part of a sweeping crackdown by Indian authorities in the wake of the government’s decision to strip Kashmir of its autonomy and statehood.

Farhan is among some 3,000 people detained in Kashmir since Aug. 5, according to an estimate from a senior local government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter. It is unclear how many of the detainees were minors, but The Washington Post has confirmed that at least five Kashmiris younger than 18 have been taken into detention since the start of the crackdown.

“There is an atmosphere of fear in every house,” said Farhan’s mother, Nazia, adding that she did not know why her son was detained. “If they can pick up children, they can do anything.”

India’s Home Affairs Ministry did not respond to requests for comment on the detention of children. The supervising officer at the Kashmir police station where Farhan’s family claims he was held declined to speak with The Post. A senior police official for the district denied that any minors had been picked up or detained.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised that removing Kashmir’s special status will usher in a “new dawn” for the Muslim-majority region. But Kashmiris have instead experienced more than three weeks of silence and anger, marked by a communications blackout and widespread detentions.

Heavy-handed security tactics are not new in Kashmir, which has been home to an anti-India insurgency since 1989. But experts say the scale and intensity of the current crackdown — targeting everyone from teenagers to relatives of militants to senior politicians — appears to be without parallel.

Human rights observers at the United Nations have expressed their concern over the situation. “It’s very worrisome,” said Bernard Duhaime, the U.N. chair-rapporteur for the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. He urged India to ensure that detentions are properly registered, relatives are informed of detainees’ whereabouts and judicial authorities verify the legality of the detentions.

A U.S. State Department spokesperson said Thursday that the agency urges “respect for human rights, compliance with legal procedures, and an inclusive dialogue with those affected” in Kashmir.

“We continue to be very concerned by reports of detentions and the continued restrictions on the residents of the region,” the spokesperson said.

Satya Pal Malik, the governor of Jammu and Kashmir who was appointed last year by New Delhi, said the government’s strategy had succeeded in saving lives. “We will restore normalcy in the region,” Malik said Wednesday. “We will deepen democracy, make it vibrant and truly representative.”

Residents said that over several months in 2016, large numbers of young men were detained by authorities after violent protests broke out in the Kashmir Valley. This time, however, the trigger was not widespread protests, nor violence by militants, but rather fear of how the population would react to the radical policy shift by New Delhi. A senior police official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the authorities are detaining people they think are likely to throw stones at security forces during protests.

Farhan and his friend Junaid Shafi Mir, 17, picked up on Aug. 5, were held in a cell with four others, with new detainees arriving and leaving each day, Junaid said. On the second day of their detention, he said, the two boys were asked to tell the police the whereabouts of another boy. When Junaid said he didn’t know the boy, an officer hit him with a wooden baton five times on his knuckles and palms, he recalled.

Nazia, Farhan’s mother, said that she came to see her son every day and that officers sometimes let her speak to him. “He would cry and ask me to take him home,” she said. “It was very difficult to see him like that.”

Raids and detentions were still underway in recent days. About 11:30 p.m. on Aug. 24, Nisar Ahmad Mir, who is not related to Junaid, was awakened by a voice claiming to be a local cleric, asking him to open the gate to his home. Half a dozen armed policemen jumped over the wall and said they were looking for his youngest son, 17-year-old Danish, he said. They whisked the boy away. Two days later Danish had still not returned.

The Post confirmed two more cases in Srinagar in which police detained minors.

Nowsheena Sheikh, 17, said her husband, Aquib, also 17, was detained on Aug. 22 when he left home to buy milk. The following day police told her he was being held at Srinagar’s central jail but did not give details of any charges against him.

“I’m scared that they may transfer him out of the state,” said Sheikh, one of dozens of people who gathered at the city’s main prison complex on a recent morning searching for information about their relatives. “How will I ever find him then?”

Her fears are not unfounded. One woman began sobbing after a guard handed her a note indicating that her relative had been moved to a jail in Uttar Pradesh, more than 600 miles away. She left immediately, clutching her 4-year-old daughter.

Some of the detentions are taking place under Kashmir’s controversial Public Safety Act, a state law that allows local officials to order that people be held for up to two years without charges or judicial review for reasons of national security.

Mainstream politicians belonging to the pro-India camp in Kashmiri politics have been detained under the act. The Post reviewed one such order for a party official of the Jammu and Kashmir People’s Conference that accused the official of having the ability to “use his network to influence the general masses to rise against the state.” It also said his party had demonstrated “unwanted dissent” toward the Indian Parliament.

Lawyers have also been targeted for detention. Abdus Salam Rather, the president of the lawyer’s association in the district of Baramulla, close to Srinagar, was detained Aug. 5. Because of the communications shutdown, his daughter — who lives in the same city — did not find out about her father’s arrest until six days later.

Rather’s daughter, grandchildren and nephew stood outside the Srinagar jail hoping to see him. Abid Salam, his nephew, expressed shock that his uncle had been arrested. “All of Kashmir is a jail now,” Salam said. “Some of them are inside, and some, like us, are outside.”

Seventeen-year-old Junaid Shafi Mir was among the thousands detained by Indian authorities in Kashmir. (Niha Masih/The Washington Post)

Slater reported from Delhi. Ishfaq Naseem and Shams Irfan in Srinagar contributed to this report.

If the world does nothing to stop the Indian assault on Kashmir and its people, two nuclear-armed states will get ever closer to a direct military confrontation.

The family of Fayaz Ahmed Mir, a tractor driver who was arrested, consoling his sister, Zahida Jan, earlier this month. Thousands of people were imprisoned by Indian security forces after India unilaterally stripped away Kashmir’s autonomy on Aug. 5.Credit Atul Loke for The New York Times

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — After I was elected prime minister of Pakistan last August, one of my foremost priorities was to work for lasting and just peace in South Asia. India and Pakistan, despite our difficult history, confront similar challenges of poverty, unemployment and climate change, especially the threat of melting glaciers and scarcity of water for hundreds of millions of our citizens.

I wanted to normalize relations with India through trade and by settling the Kashmir dispute, the foremost impediment to the normalization of relations between us.

On July 26, 2018, in my first televised address to Pakistan after winning the elections, I stated we wanted peace with India and if it took one step forward, we would take two steps. After that, a meeting between our two foreign ministers was arranged on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly session in September 2018, but India canceled the meeting. That September I also wrote my first of three letters to Prime Minister Narendra Modi calling for dialogue and peace.

Unfortunately, all my efforts to start a dialogue for peace were rebuffed by India. Initially, we assumed that Mr. Modi’s increasingly hard-line positions and his rhetoric against Pakistan were aimed to whip up a nationalist frenzy among the Indian voters with an eye on the Indian elections in May.

On Feb. 14, a few months before those elections, a young Kashmiri man carried out a suicide attack against Indian troops in Indian-occupied Kashmir. The Indian government promptly blamed Pakistan.

We asked for evidence, but Mr. Modi sent Indian Air Force fighter planes across the border to Pakistan. Our Air Force brought down an Indian plane and captured the pilot. We struck back to signal we could defend ourselves but chose not to strike a target that would cause loss of life. I made a conscious decision to show that Pakistan had no intent of aggravating the conflict between two nuclear-armed states. We returned the captured Indian pilot, with no preconditions.

On May 23, after Mr. Modi’s re-election, I congratulated him and hoped we could work for “peace, progress and prosperity in South Asia.” In June, I sent another letter to Mr. Modi offering dialogue to work toward peace. Again, India chose not to respond. And we found out that while I was making peace overtures, India had been lobbying to get Pakistan placed on the “blacklist” at the intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force, which could lead to severe economic sanctions and push us toward bankruptcy.

Evidently Mr. Modi had mistaken our desire for peace in a nuclear neighborhood as appeasement. We were not simply up against a hostile government. We were up against a “New India,” which is governed by leaders and a party that are the products of the Hindu supremacist mother ship, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or the R.S.S.

The Indian prime minister and several ministers of his government continue to be members of the R.S.S., whose founding fathers expressed their admiration for Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Mr. Modi has written with great love and reverence about M.S. Golwalkar, the second supreme leader of the R.S.S., and has referred to Mr. Golwakar as “Pujiniya Shri Guruji (Guru Worthy of Worship).”

Mr. Modi’s guru wrote admiringly about the Final Solution in “We, Our Nationhood Defined,” his 1939 book: “To keep up the purity of the race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic Races — the Jews. National pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan for us to learn and profit by.”

I had hoped that being elected prime minister might lead Mr. Modi to cast aside his old ways as the chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat, when he gained global notoriety for the 2002 pogrom against local Muslims on his watch and was denied a visa to travelto the United States under its International Religious Freedom Act — a list of visa denials that included associates of Slobodan Milosevic.

Mr. Modi’s first term as prime minister had been marked by lynching of Muslims, Christians and Dalits by extremist Hindu mobs. In Indian-occupied Kashmir, we have witnessed increased state violence against defiant Kashmiris. Pellet-firing shotguns were introduced and aimed at the eyes of young Kashmiri protesters, blinding hundreds.

And Mr. Modi’s “New India” chose to do this by imposing a military curfew in Kashmir, imprisoning its population in their homes and cutting off their phone, internet and television connections, rendering them without news of the world or their loved ones. The siege was followed by a purge: Thousands of Kashmiris have been arrested and thrown into prisons across India. A blood bath is feared in Kashmir when the curfew is lifted. Already, Kashmiris coming out in defiance of the curfew are being shot and killed.

If the world does nothing to stop the Indian assault on Kashmir and its people, there will be consequences for the whole world as two nuclear-armed states get ever closer to a direct military confrontation. India’s defense minister has issued a not-so-veiled nuclear threat to Pakistan by saying that the future of India’s “no first use” policy on nuclear weapons will “depend on circumstances.” Similar statements have been made by Indian leaders periodically. Pakistan has long viewed India’s “no first use” claims with skepticism.

With the nuclear shadow hovering over South Asia, we realize that Pakistan and India have to move out of a zero-sum mind-set to begin dialogue on Kashmir, various strategic matters and trade. On Kashmir, the dialogue must include all stakeholders, especially the Kashmiris. We have already prepared multiple options that can be worked on while honoring the right to self-determination the Kashmiris were promised by the Security Council resolutions and India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Through dialogue and negotiations, the stakeholders can arrive at a viable solution to end the decades of suffering of the Kashmiri people and move toward a stable and just peace in the region. But dialogue can start only when India reverses its illegal annexation of Kashmir, ends the curfew and lockdown, and withdraws its troops to the barracks.

It is imperative that the international community think beyond trade and business advantages. World War II happened because of appeasement at Munich. A similar threat looms over the world again, but this time under the nuclear shadow.

Jinnah said these words, which make the title of this outburst of mine, at a time when he announced the Day of Deliverance in November 1939 at the resignation of Congress’ 1937 provincial governments elected under the Government of India act 1935 – the infamous British attempt to impose a constitutional framework on British India against the will of her people.

The 2 or so years of Congress rule in British Indian provinces under the umbrella of British governors and of course a British viceroy, proved to be the greatest watershed in Indian Muslim history – an eye opener for the Indian Muslim and for the few British who were not afflicted with the historical ailment of delusion that British imperialism has continued to suffer from just like its more contemporary counterparts in the present-day world i.e. the American imperialism, the notorious Zionist imperialism, not to forget Hindu imperialism working…

The so-called “Baloch Liberation Army” issued a video ultimatum to China over the weekend to discontinue its CPEC development projects in Pakistan’s Balochistan or face a renewed wave of terrorist attacks against its interests there, with this message unambiguously proving that the group is far from the “national liberation movement” that it purports to be […]

Yesterday, four heavily armed BLA terrorists dressed in uniforms of security service personnel broke into a five-star hotel in Gwadar with the intent of slaughtering civilian gusts including foreigners – Chinese guests in particular. After a heroic security guard was martyred in his valiant attempted to prevent the terrorists from entering the building, a firefight took place between the terrorists and the authorities. Ultimately, all four of the terrorists were destroyed.

This was the second major BLA attack in recent months. In April, between 15-20 BLA terrorists boarded a bus in Ormara whilst also wearing uniforms of the security services. The terrorists then proceeded to shoot 14 civilians at point blank range in one of the most vile attacks of the year.

In each instance, the BLA has attempted to sow both bloodshed and fear among locals and visitors to Gwadar. As Gwadar is set to become a future megacity of international trade, regional commerce, energy production and tourism, the forces of wickedness are doing everything they can to retard this progress. This de facto makes the BLA an enemy of CPEC and of the prosperity Pakistan shall derive from its Belt and Road connectivity. This itself explains why Chinese civilians were targeted in yesterday’s hotel siege.

It must be made clear by Pakistani officials in the highest of public places that the BLA’s creation and existence was facilitated by an Indian state and RAW which after 1971 sought to do to Balochistan what was done to East Pakistan. In spite of the fact that Balochistan is the least populace province of Pakistan, its strategic location has always been a source of envy for those in India whose goal is to eliminate the existence of the Pakistani state.

Balochistan, like KP province is also vulnerable due to its misfortune of sharing a border with Afghanistan. For decades, countries like India and others have used friendly Afghan regimes to set up base in the country with the aim of conducting cross-border terror attacks on Pakistan. It is almost certain that Afghan supply lines were used in both last month’s and this month’s attacks in Balochistan.

It is therefore imperative for Pakistan to hold India and Afghanistan to account. In respect of India, Pakistan should make an official complaint to the UN about the matter and enter decades worth of evidence onto the record at the world’s highest international forum.

In respect of Afghanistan, the Caroline Test in international law allows for Pakistan to conduct legal airstrikes on terrorist elements in Afghanistan that pose a clear and present danger to Pakistani security. As the BLA have multiple assets in Afghanistan, it is therefore perfectly legal and ethically legitimate for Pakistan to conduct such strikes.

While black propagandists blame Pakistan’s problems with terror on internal situations, the fact of the matter is that for decades, the country has been squeezed like an accordion by Indian provocations to the east and Afghan provocations to the west. The fact that many have asked whether India is housing anti-Pakistan assets at the Indian managed port at Iran’s Chabahar, means that it is likewise imperative for Tehran to cooperate with Pakistan over such enquiries.

Unless Pakistan takes into account all of the dastardly deeds of its neighbours and corrects these injustices at the UN and if necessary through legal military actions, the situation will not change. The time for the rhetoric of idiocy has long since passed. Human life has been put at risk due to Islamabad’s traditional willingness to bow before foreign agitators.